Civilization #55: Kant, Hegel, and the Theory of Everything

My main argument is that Immanuel Kant takes the main thesis of Dante—that imagination is the animating force of the universe and love is the unifying force—and uses his epistemology to clarify, rationalize, and systemize it. Epistemology simply means the theory of knowledge: how do we know what we know?

If you read Dante, it's not very explicit what he's saying; you have to interpret him properly. Kant makes Dante explicit to the world. He then rationalizes it, which means he removes divinity and theology from it to create a system of logic. Finally, he systemizes it. This was Kant's mission: to take the secret of the universe as first presented in Dante and create a system of logic that could incorporate itself into science, history, philosophy, and the world that we know. Together, Dante and Kant created the world we live in today.

The Philosophical Background: Plato vs. Aristotle

For most of Western history, there have been two major philosophers: Plato and Aristotle. Up until Kant, you could divide all philosophy into these two major camps.

Plato's World of Forms

Plato believes that God is called the Form of the Good. The Form of the Good is this perfect, immaculate, eternal force that emits, emanates, breathes, and thinks, creating something called the ideals. These are the perfect conceptions of beauty, reason, and justice. These ideals then give rise to the forms, which are the perfect encapsulation of these ideals—think of the perfect horse, the perfect chair, or the perfect square.

This is the real world, what is true and real. We live in the shadow world. Remember the allegory of the cave: everything in the shadow world is only an imitation of the forms. In this conception, what is good is to move towards the Form of the Good, to return to it. What is evil is to move away from it. That's why for Plato, art and poetry are evil—because you're imitating an imitation. Conversely, mathematics and philosophy are inherently good because they teach you how to return to the Form of the Good.

Plato's ideas are important because they become the basis for the concepts of heaven and earth, which is the basis for Christianity. Remember, in Catholic Church doctrine, our life on this planet doesn't really matter; what matters is our return to heaven to be with God.

We say that Plato is a dualist. There are three conceptions of the universe:

1. The materialistic worldview (Aristotle), which says that only things you can see and touch matter.
2. The idealistic worldview (Hegel), which says that only ideas matter.
3. The dualistic worldview (Plato), which believes that both matter and ideas matter.

Aristotle's Prime Mover

For Aristotle, his god is called the prime mover. The prime mover is the first thing that moves, and when it moves, it causes other things to move as well through cause and effect. In this world, what matters is movement. Everything is moving towards something called telos, which is the Greek word for purpose. For example, as a teacher, my telos is to teach as well as I can. My mission in life is to constantly learn, improve, and practice so that my teaching becomes better and better. We can understand through observation and experience what each thing's telos is, and then we can start to categorize things.

Aristotle's ideas, of course, become the basis for science. As I mentioned, Aristotle has a materialistic worldview, as opposed to Plato's dualistic one. He doesn't really care about things outside the material world; he's only concerned about the here and now.

The Reemergence of Philosophy: Rationalists, Empiricists, and Skeptics

As the Catholic Church came into power and held a monopoly, it suppressed these philosophical inquiries. But after the Renaissance, the schools of thought of Plato and Aristotle reemerged into three major schools.

Taking up Plato's perspective were the rationalists. The three most famous rationalists are René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Baruch Spinoza. They adopted Plato's worldview: there is a god, and through mathematics and logic, we can reason out the mind of God from first principles. The project of rationalism is towards omniscience. This is best represented by Descartes and becomes the basis for the Enlightenment. The rationalists are also called the Continental philosophers because their work was based on the continent of Europe.

Opposing the rationalists were the empiricists, who adopted the Aristotelian worldview. The most famous empiricist is John Locke, who believed our minds are born tabula rasa, which means "blank slate." There is nothing in our minds, so the only way we can acquire knowledge and wisdom is through experience and something called induction.

In logic, there are two methods:

• Deduction: Taking the general to the specific.
• Induction: Taking the specific and generalizing it into the abstract.

For example, if I see five boys wearing white shirts, I can generalize and say that all boys wear white shirts. But if the general principle is "all boys wear white shirts," then through deduction I can say, "Well, you're a boy, therefore you wear a white shirt." This idea of empiricism becomes the basis for the scientific method.

Then there's another school of philosophy called skepticism, pioneered mainly by David Hume. Hume looked at the idea of induction and argued that you cannot generalize things. Just because you meet one million swans that are white does not mean that all swans are white. It is entirely possible that there's a black swan out there. Hume negates induction and argues that our understanding of the world is based primarily on custom. For him, custom just means consensus: we agree this is right, therefore it is right. There's no inherent truth to it.

Hume is very controversial because he argues that true knowledge is impossible, which means that the entire project of philosophy is pointless. You know what you know through experience and custom; you cannot abstract or reason things out beyond that. Therefore, what's the point of philosophy?

Kant's Copernican Revolution: The Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant read David Hume and was so agonized over his conclusions that he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason. This is considered the greatest treatise of philosophy in human history. It's extremely dense and complicated. He is so fundamental to the development of human civilization that we need to study him.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant shows that all three schools of thought—rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism—are all in their own way problematic. In doing so, he constructs a new theory of everything that will become the cornerstone for neuroscience, physics, and artificial intelligence. His contribution to human civilization cannot be understated.

• For Kant, the rationalist school is problematic because he believes that omniscience is not possible. It is impossible for us to ever achieve the mind of God. There are limitations to the pursuit of knowledge and to our capacity to reason.
• The empiricist argument of tabula rasa cannot possibly be true. He shows through empirical proof that it's not possible for minds to be blank slates. We need to have certain mechanisms of thought already in place for us to engage with the world.
• His problem with Hume is that he believes there is knowledge that is real, inherent, and true, and so knowledge can be pursued. For Kant, philosophy is the most important pursuit in human history.

By responding to all three of these major schools, Kant creates a radical new theory of the world—his own unique epistemology based on the thinking of Dante.

We are all endowed with the capacity to reason. We all have minds, and our minds engage reality. Kant says that the moment we engage in reality, we create a new universe called appearance.

To understand Kant, it's very important to understand his terminology.

• For Kant, reality is things-in-themselves, and here he uses the Greek word noumena. This is the world that is true and real.
• The world of appearance is what I call things-for-us—things that we see but which may not be true. He uses the Greek word phenomena.

He argues that within us, there is a mechanism in our minds that is always perceiving reality in a way that allows us to understand, interpret, and manipulate it. This is his thesis.

A Priori Synthetic Knowledge

Kant reasons out what is possible in epistemology by creating categories. There are four major categories we need to know.

First, there are two types of knowledge:

• A priori: Latin for "things that come before." This is knowledge that is independent of experience—things that are universal, necessary, and true in themselves.
• A posteriori: Latin for "things that come after." These are things that you learn after you experience them.

He also has two more categories of logic:

• Analytical: Things that are true in themselves, true by definition. If I say, "A square has four sides," or "A triangle has three sides," that's an analytical statement. I can also say, "A is A," or "Mary is a woman." These are all identity statements.
• Synthetic: Statements that are not analytical, meaning you need to build them based on other information, and they could be false. Think of synthetic as non-analytical.

Kant then says if there are two-by-two categories, there are four possibilities.

• A priori analytical is just logic.
• A posteriori synthetic is what we call empirical knowledge—the John Locke project of empiricism.
• A posteriori analytical doesn't really matter (a square has four sides whether you see one or not).

The main conflict between David Hume and Immanuel Kant is whether or not a priori synthetic knowledge exists. Hume says it is impossible for a priori synthetic knowledge to exist. But Kant will show us that it does exist, and he calls it transcendental idealism. He spends his entire book, about a thousand pages, explaining why this must be true—why you must have a priori synthetic knowledge in your brain to understand the world.

His main argument is this: if you study mathematics, philosophy, or classical Newtonian physics and break things down to the most fundamental level, you will discover that we have to bring certain assumptions into these fields for them to exist. These two very basic things that we bring in are called space and time.

Space means sensation, and time is sequence—an ordering of things (one, two, three, four, five). Space is our interaction with the world around us. Unless we have these two basic concepts, no knowledge is possible. This is a hard concept to understand. What Kant is saying is that space and time do not exist in reality. Space and time are a projection of our minds in order to substantialize reality in a way that allows us to understand and manipulate it.

In other words, a very simple way to understand this is that our minds turn the world into a story. Why? Because if you have space and time, you have causality—cause and effect. Causality is a story. Kant is saying we are just imagining reality into a story, and that allows us to understand it.

The Process of Perception

After Kant proves that space and time must exist a priori, he explains how we take reality and turn it into appearance. He shows that our mind has a three-stage process for doing this:

1. Apprehension: You're engaging the things-in-themselves.
2. Reproduction: Through space and time, by inputting space and time into things-in-themselves, you're able to reproduce an image of it in your brain.
3. Recognition: To understand it, you filter space-time using something he calls categories.

Think of categories as our algorithm, or a better word is heuristic. Computers use algorithms; we use heuristics. There are 12 different categories, but there are four major ones:

• Quantity: How much of a thing is it?
• Quality: What are the properties of this thing?
• Relation: Is this thing logical or empirical?
• Modality: What is the strength of the relation of this thing?

You don't need to remember the categories, just remember that Kant is saying inherent in our mind is a heuristic that allows us to turn information into knowledge. When we do this, we create a schema, a representation of the world that allows for understanding. For example, we see a lot of triangles, but we don't actually have an image of a triangle in our head; we only have a concept of a triangle. This schema then returns to the categories, which allows us to filter the world even more. It is a feedback loop.

All this is reaffirming the Dantean belief that the imagination is the animating force of the world. Without us, reality cannot be alive. It is our imagination that makes reality alive to us.

Kant's Moral Philosophy: The Categorical Imperative

Kant also wrote a book called the Critique of Practical Reason, where he presents a theory of morality. For Kant, the highest ideal in morality is something called the categorical imperative. This is separate and distinct from the hypothetical imperative. The hypothetical imperative is circumstantial: if you are a child in a school, how should you behave? The categorical imperative is the absolute—how you should always behave.

For Kant, there are three major principles that underlie all morality:

1. Universal Law: Imagine that each of your actions will be universalized so that everyone will behave the way you do. You can choose to steal, but imagine everyone stealing. What kind of world would that be? You certainly would not want to live in that world. Behave as though everyone is watching you and is going to do what you do. Be the best possible example.
2. Humanity as an End: See humans each as an end in themselves and not as a means. Do not manipulate people or use people. Treat people with respect.
3. Autonomous Will: Everything you do must be something that you reason out yourself. You're not coerced, manipulated, or tricked into doing it. It's something that, sitting by yourself in a room, you are able to reason out independently.

This is the idea of the categorical imperative, which Kant believes is what we should all strive for and are all capable of doing because we are capable of reason and imagination. We are capable of imagining a moral world. This is important because it becomes the basis for what we have today: the United Nations, human rights, and international law. That's how influential Kant has been.

How can we understand the categorical imperative? Let's go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He proposed the idea of the general will. The general will is not democracy. Democracy is simply getting everyone to vote. If I ask everyone in this room what we should have for lunch, and someone proposes ice cream and everyone raises their hand, that's democracy. But Rousseau argues the general will is the best interest of the people that you can derive just by reasoning it out yourself. If you were to all sit down by yourself and ask what we should have for lunch, it wouldn't be ice cream, because ice cream makes you fat, has too much sugar, and is bad for you. You would probably think we should have a salad. The general will represents the best interests of everyone involved.

In other words, the categorical imperative is just the individualized general will. It is a general will that you internalize and behave as though you are the general will.

There's another way of understanding the categorical imperative, and that's by using Dante. In the Divine Comedy, Dante's categorical imperative is very simple: love someone. It doesn't matter who—it could be your wife, your mother, your child, or your best friend. But love that person. When you love that person, then all three principles are true: you are now going to be your best, you are treating this person with respect, and you are choosing to love this person.

Love is the unifying force of the universe. That's what Dante is really saying. In other words, Kant is just systemizing what Dante said in the Divine Comedy.

Three Experiments to Understand Kant

To better understand Kant's argument, here are three examples.

1. The Diary Experiment: Imagine you write a diary for a whole year. Every day, you write what happened. You have 365 separate entries. At the end of the year, write one long diary entry covering the whole year. In theory, the separate entries should add up to equal the one long entry. But what you'll find if you actually do this experiment is that the long entry you wrote has almost no relation at all with the 365 separate entries. In other words, we are constantly, every day, reimagining the world in a new way and building on top of this. We are taking discrete data points and combining them into one complete story.
2. The Memory Experiment: Organize 100 classmates and go to a park together. Spend the whole day doing the same things. The next day, ask all 100 students to write down their experience of that one day. I guarantee you every person's experience will be different and unique to themselves, thus affirming what Kant said: the imagination is the animating force of the universe.
3. The Island Thought Experiment: Imagine you end up on a fertile island where you don't have to worry about starving. One day, you go to sleep, and your mind is wiped clean. It becomes a tabula rasa, as proposed by John Locke. You have no memory, you can't speak, you've lost the capacity for language and reason. You don't know who or where you are. What will happen to you? If you follow John Locke, you're going to starve to death because you don't know what to eat. You'll put a stone in your mouth, a leaf in your mouth. You've lost all knowledge. But according to Kant, sure, you've lost all knowledge, but because you have a priori synthetic knowledge, because you manipulate reality around you and your mind is very good at filtering and categorizing information, it will take you a very short amount of time to figure out what is edible. You'll know stones and wood are a category of stuff you cannot eat, but fruits, water, and fish are another category of things you can eat. Through pure intuition, we can figure out that Kant makes more intuitive sense than John Locke.

How did Kant perceive himself, and what is his current reputation in the scientific community?

Kant saw himself as a revolutionary thinker, like Copernicus. He believed he was going to fundamentally change the way we perceive the universe. In fact, he calls his Critique of Pure Reason a Copernican Revolution.

As for science, Kant's ideas are really the basis for modern-day science. Einstein was heavily influenced by Kant. He read Kant when he was 16, and Kant's theories of space-time and a priori synthetic knowledge gave him the theory of relativity. If you study quantum mechanics, you will discover a lot of ideas were heavily influenced by Kant. His influence on science is incredible.

From Kant to Hegel: Resolving the Unknowable

With Kant, his philosophy is that we interact with the noumena, which gives us the phenomena—the things we can see, the appearance. There are three major issues that are unresolved in Kant, which he acknowledges but doesn't really provide a solution for:

1. What is the noumena? What are the things-in-themselves? Kant says we can never know.
2. What is the source of our minds? If our brains are capable of reason through a priori synthetic knowledge, where does that knowledge come from?
3. How do we ensure uniformity? If it is true that we are always projecting onto the noumena to create phenomena, how do we know that we're all doing it the same way? Are the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Greeks all perceiving the world in the same way?

Kant says we don't know, but we have to believe in uniformity, otherwise the world doesn't make any sense. How is it possible to have mathematics and science without it? But this is not satisfying.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel comes along and provides a theory of everything. He resolves these three issues for Kant and creates an entire system of thought that encompasses everything.

Hegel's major insight is: what if, as we're perceiving the noumena, the noumena is projecting back onto us? It becomes the source for our ability to perceive it. In other words, the noumena is really the source that creates uniformity.

What is this noumena? The word Hegel uses is Geist. This is a German word that we translate into "mind" or "spirit." Hegel's major work is called the Phenomenology of the Mind, which can also be translated as the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The problem is that "mind" and "spirit" don't really explain that much.

Imagine Geist as the internet and we are individual computers, always interacting with this internet. That gives you a basic framework. To fully understand what Geist is, we need to go into the etymology of the word. There are three English words that were influenced by Geist:

• Ghost: The idea that the Geist is coexisting with us. It is not separate from us; it is here and now.
• Geyser: An expansion, a spawning up. The Geist is always growing; it wants to grow and expand.
• Gist: The gist of an argument, the essence of an argument.

Hegel is saying the Geist is the essence of reality. The Geist comes first; it's the source for who we are. That's why we say Hegel is an idealist. He doesn't care about the material world; what matters to him is the Geist itself, the ideas, because that's what drives human history.

The Dialectic and the Movement of History

How does the Geist actually move? For Hegel, what matters are not things or ideas, but the movement of things. The main thing that moves is the dialectic. From the dialectic, we have the thesis, which moves to the antithesis, which moves into the synthesis. This is the movement of human history.

The way to understand this is that we all seek self-knowledge. But the way to seek self-knowledge is by asking who we are not, which creates the antithesis. When we have the idea of who we are not, this comes in conflict with who we are, which then creates new knowledge.

To understand this idea, let's do a thought experiment. Let's go back to the island, and there are 100 of us sleeping in different corners. During the night, our minds are wiped clean. We are all tabula rasa. We wake up and forget that there are other people there. We don't even know who we are. When we wake up, what we see is the universe—space and time—and we think that we are the universe. There is a reconciliation between us and the world, and we're really happy.

But as we move along the beach, we see someone else. This other person threatens us because they are like us, but not like us. This person has destroyed my conception of the universe, which was "I am the universe" or "I am God." This creates conflict. We might physically fight or argue. But over time, we create a synthesis: the two of us are now the universe. The problem is, we walk along and meet another person, and another. This is a constant process. But over time, even though there's conflict and violence, it's all a natural part of enlightenment. It's all part of the process of reconciliation where eventually all 100 of us rediscover who we are through conflict and differentiation and form a collective consciousness. We become what Hegel calls the absolute spirit. That is the progress and the purpose of our lives.

Let me frame it in a different way. These are my words, not Hegel's, but I think this is the best way to explain what he's really saying about the movement of history. God has two forms: God is the Geist, but God is also the universe. Why would God do this? Because God is trying to create reconciliation between itself and all the things in the universe. It's trying to come to peace, an awareness between itself and us. The Geist, through the dialectic, is growing and growing until it becomes the universe itself, and that is the end of history.

This is what we call a teleological movement of history, where things are moving towards their purpose. Hegel says the world is becoming. Do not think of the world as being, but as becoming—constantly in a process of transformation, growth, and expansion. Why? Because it wants to become being. The being is when we are completely reconciled to God. That's the end of history: the reconciliation between us and God. When we become God and God becomes us, there's no more differentiation, no more conflict. We are moving towards this because the world is teleological. Every single thing that we do is moving towards the one reunion with God.

To prove this, Hegel discusses how we know the Geist. In culture, we know the Geist through art, philosophy, and religion. When you study these three things historically, you will discover they are all progressing.

• In terms of art, we are in the Romantic period, which is the highest period of art because it is synthesizing all previous periods.
• The highest religion is Christianity because it is the beginning of a reconciliation between us and God. Jesus was the great democratic force that allowed us to access God in our own way. Before, God was captured and imprisoned by priests, and Jesus freed God.
• Of course, the highest philosophy is Hegel's, because his theory of the Geist is the endpoint of all our knowledge. From the Geist, we can now finally move towards reconciliation.

The Legacies of Hegel

There are three major legacies of Hegel.

1. By far the most influential is the creation of Marxism. Karl Marx will take Hegel's theory of the movement of history—the dialectic—and create something called dialectical materialism. He will invert Hegel. Hegel says only ideas matter; Marx will say only material things matter. But he will also adopt a lot of Hegelian thinking.
2. The second major influence is the idea that "God is dead." It was not Nietzsche who introduced this term; it was Hegel. By "God is dead," Hegel is saying we need to change our conception of God. Before, we thought God was aloof, distant, and absolute. Now, Hegel presents a more advanced version of God—a God that is moving in us towards itself.
3. The third major influence is the idea of the nation-state. This theory of Geist becomes part of the nation-state, and because of Hegel, we could believe that the nation-state can have a soul. This will lead to a lot of problems, including imperialism, war, and other fun things. But we cannot understate the influence of Hegel.

Hegel is very abstract. If you spend enough time on the Critique of Pure Reason, you will get through it. But if you try to read Hegel, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit, it's almost impossible. Everyone who reads it will have a different interpretation. The reason why is that Hegel is trying to synthesize all human knowledge—everything that's happened, everything that we know—into a system, which Kant basically said we can't really do.

The Legacy of Kant and Hegel

Kant was really aware of what he was doing. His argument was that the Critique of Pure Reason marks a radical new stage in human history, like Copernicus. Before Copernicus, we thought we were at the center of the universe; Copernicus banished us to the margins. Kant tried to do the same thing. Pre-Kant, philosophers thought there was an objective reality and that we were just observers who could ultimately access it through logic and experience. Kant says no, the world is entirely subjective. We project our imagination and ideas onto the universe. We are active participants in the world. This gives rise to the idea of Romanticism, which is that the human imagination is the highest ideal and, in many ways, participates in God itself.

Let's remind ourselves of the difference between Kant and Hegel.

Kant is extremely logical and honest. He says there's nothing he can do to prove God exists, but we must believe God exists, otherwise we have no morality. He also says we must believe free will exists, even though there's no logical proof, otherwise what's the point of existence?

Kant's Vindication Through Modern Science

What's amazing is that the more science progresses, the more Kant is proven right.

Neuroscience is telling us today that we hallucinate reality. There are lots of experiments that prove this.

• We see a triangle here, but it doesn't exist. It's just part of our imagination. The lines exist; the triangle doesn't. But the first thing we see is this triangle.

• This image appears to move, but we know it doesn't. Our mind is playing tricks on us.

• We see these lines as slanted, but when you take them side by side, you'll see they are parallel.

• Which circle is bigger? They're the same, but because of the surrounding circles, we think one is bigger than the other.

• Squares A and B appear to be different colors, but actually, they're the same color.

Neuroscientists have done a lot of experiments and have proven that we constantly participate in reality. We hallucinate reality, which is what Kant originally proposed.

Artificial intelligence shows us the limits of the blank slate theory. Let's imagine you actually had a blank slate in your mind. That would be extremely problematic, and we know this because of how artificial intelligence works. When we talk about artificial intelligence, what exists is supervised learning. The idea is we're trying to teach a machine to recognize a picture. We feed a lot of training data—millions of pictures—into the algorithm and label this data so the machine can figure out the differences. It basically turns every picture into a mathematical concept, and if you train it well enough, it's able to differentiate between a triangle and a circle.

The problem with this is it's very expensive and time-consuming. Now let's compare this with how a human does it. If I just give you a picture of a sheep, you're able to know what a sheep is.

A machine is able to tell you this is a sheep. But what a machine is not able to tell you is if this sheep is real or fake.We think it's fake, but the machine says it doesn't know. And the machine is correct. "Real" and "fake" are categories of our mind. How do we know this is a fake sheep and not a real sheep? A machine is saying, "If I don't know anything, if I have no a priori synthetic knowledge, then I cannot differentiate between fake and real." But a child can know this is a fake sheep because we have categories in our minds. A machine could not tell you what this is, because this has become a schema, a concept. But any child can tell you this is a sheep.Artificial intelligence is showing us that Kant was correct.

Physics also confirms Kant's ideas. As mentioned, Kant inspired Einstein to dream up the theory of relativity. The theory is fairly straightforward. Let's say I'm sitting on a train platform, and you guys are across from me. We're not moving. But let's say that for whatever reason, simultaneously, both platforms start moving at the same speed. From our perspective, we're still not moving. That's the idea of relativity: the laws of physics are relative to where we are at the moment.

What's really fun is to think about quantum mechanics, which confirms that things-in-themselves (noumena) are not knowable to us. This is a major argument between Kant and Hegel. We looked at light and wanted to know its essence—what are photons? We discovered something really problematic: photons are both wavelike and particle-like. They are both movement and something static. What's even more problematic is that you're not able to figure out the state of the light until you actually measure it. Before you measure particles, they are simultaneously occupying many different possibilities, something we call a superposition. A wave function is all the probabilities of its position in space. When you measure it, it collapses into one data point.

In school, we're taught the Bohr model of the atom, but really it's an electron cloud, meaning we don't know where the electrons are at a certain state. We can only know the probability of where they could be.

Einstein hated this theory. He thought it was disgusting, too random, and ugly. He thought that God as an architect had an elegant mind, and to come up with theories like quantum mechanics was insulting God. To disprove it, Einstein wrote a paper on quantum entanglement. The idea is this: things exist in opposition to each other. Two atoms might be aligned together, and their two states are mirror images. If you split these two and send them off to different corners of the universe, according to quantum mechanics, the moment you measure the first atom, the second atom must also reveal itself simultaneously, even though you have not measured it and they could be at different ends of the universe. Einstein said this can't possibly be true; it's a stupid idea that proves quantum mechanics doesn't work.

The problem is, we've done experiments to prove quantum entanglement actually does work. Not only that, but quantum mechanics has proven itself to be the most successful theory in physics of all time because it's given rise to the transistor. The idea of the transistor is that if you can understand electrons, you can manipulate them to make calculations. The transistor has given rise to the computer, which has given rise to the internet, basically creating the world we live in today.

Even though we know quantum mechanics to be true, we don't know why it's true. One of the biggest problems is Schrödinger's cat. Schrödinger created a thought experiment to show how problematic quantum mechanics is. Let's say you have a cat inside a box with radioactive material. You can never know if this cat is dead or alive. The only thing you can say is it is both dead and alive.

It's even more problematic. Another physicist, Wigner, said, "Let's do another thought experiment. I'm a scientist. I open the box. Then I know the state of the cat. But let's say there's a friend in my laboratory observing me, and he has not himself opened the box. When I open the box and find the cat is dead, what happens to him?" This shows how problematic quantum mechanics is. The question they're trying to deal with is: is reality subjective or objective? Can there be one reality in which we all live, or is reality constantly multiplying subjectively? Whenever we make a decision, it changes reality for us but not for others. Is it possible we all live within our own universe that is unique to us?

Quantum mechanics cannot answer this question. But if we go back to Kant, the answer is obvious. It is true that we do create our own individual reality. The noumena is something we can never see. The mind, when it interfaces with the thing-in-itself, creates the world that we live in.

This brings us back to the point that the imagination is the animating force of the universe. When we use the imagination, we create our own reality that is distinct from other realities.

Philosophy Creates Reality

Is Kant describing the world we live in, or did he create this reality that we live in? Rather than artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and quantum mechanics all confirming what Kant first argued, another way of saying this is that Kant gave them the intellectual capacity to come up with these theories by themselves.

Philosophy creates the boundaries of the human imagination, and all science is doing is playing with these boundaries to confirm what is known within them.

Is science capable of coming up with new ideas by itself? The argument I would make is no. You can have data, but what matters is your interpretation of this data. And this interpretation comes from the Geist—the collective mind that philosophers like Kant and Hegel created. This is problematic because we live in a world today that is undervaluing philosophy and the arts and overvaluing STEM. If we just spend all our money on science, it's all going to be useless.

In the Dantean world, Dante talks to God and writes the Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy then inspires Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason, which inspires Hegel. The two together will go on to inspire neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and quantum mechanics. In other words, it is imagination that creates all reality, not just our individual reality. There are some of us who are geniuses who are able to imagine a new reality in which we can now inhabit and participate.

Ever since Königsberg fell, ever since the Germans lost World War II, we have not made major advances in science. The transistor is not a major advance; it's just technology, taking a science and expressing it in the world. Without culture, without the Geist, is it possible to advance science? I think the answer is no. I think we're stuck where we are because we've abandoned culture.

Immanuel Kant was a citizen of Königsberg. In fact, he was called the "Königsberg clock" because he was so regimented. He would take a walk at a very specific time, and by observing where he was, the residents of Königsberg would know what time it was. You can make the argument that Kant created Königsberg, because after him it would become the intellectual and scientific center of Europe. But Königsberg also created him—an idea which would be very familiar to Hegel.